China Executes Lao Rongzhi, Caught After 20 Years on the Run, for Seven Murders
China's top court found she picked the targets and her boyfriend Fa Ziying attacked them. He was executed in 1999. She lived under false names until 2019.
Published
Lao Rongzhi spent two decades running from seven killings. On the morning of Monday, December 18, 2023, the Nanchang Intermediate People's Court in Jiangxi province executed her, after China's Supreme People's Court approved the death sentence the Nanchang court had imposed two years earlier. She was 49. The court said she had been allowed to meet her family beforehand and had apologized to the victims' families, and that local prosecutors supervised the execution.
The crimes reached back to 1996. According to the Supreme People's Court, Lao, a former primary school teacher from Jiangxi, worked with Fa Ziying, her boyfriend at the time, in a run of robberies, kidnappings and killings across Jiangxi, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Anhui that lasted until 1999. Lao picked the targets at entertainment venues. Fa attacked them. Seven people died, a child among them, and the bodies of some of the victims were abused. Between them, the court found, the pair robbed and extorted more than 100,000 yuan.
The court's account of one case, in Nanchang, shows how it worked. Lao lured a man surnamed Xiong to her rented apartment, where she and Fa robbed him, killed him and dismembered his body. She used a key she had taken from him to open his home, and the two robbed it. To eliminate witnesses, they also killed Xiong's wife and his 2-year-old daughter.
Police seized Fa at a rented house in Anhui in 1999. He was sentenced to death and executed later that year. Lao escaped. For the next 20 years she lived under false identities, until she was caught in a shopping mall in Xiamen, in Fujian province, in November 2019.
In September 2021 the Nanchang court convicted her of intentional homicide, robbery and kidnapping and sentenced her to death. The Jiangxi High People's Court upheld the convictions and the sentence in November 2022. Under Chinese law, a death sentence handed down by a lower court cannot be carried out until the Supreme People's Court reviews and approves it. During that review the top court questioned Lao herself, and her lawyer was allowed to see the case files, meet her and submit a defense.
The review left no doubt about how the court saw her part in it. Lao, it found, had played a crucial role in the killings and should be punished as a principal offender. "The circumstances of Lao's crimes were particularly serious, and the criminal methods she did were extremely cruel," the Supreme People's Court said. "With deep subjective malice, she posed great personal and social danger, bringing extremely severe consequences." It also upheld the lifetime loss of her political rights and the confiscation of all her assets.
The Supreme People's Court's statement was issued in Chinese, and China Daily's two English reports of it translate the court's words slightly differently. The quotation here follows the paper's December 18 report. Neither report names the child among the seven dead or says whether that child was Xiong's daughter, and the victims outside Nanchang are not identified in either.
Sources
- Justice arrives as Lao Rongzhi's punishment finally completes, China Daily (Cao Yin)
- Female serial killer Lao Rongzhi executed, China Daily, via ECNS